He continued south, riding hard by day, alternating his grilz, walking them through the night, and avoiding the occasional town, until both he and the animals were exhausted. Somewhere off to the west the city of Scory stood smugly atop its invulnerable hill, and he was impatient to get there. He snapped the harness and urged his gril to greater speed.
In the remote southeastern corner of the lilorr he began again. He stole grain bags and cached them, and when he had enough he pronounced the magic word, “Come!” and led an entire village of olz from the night-fire. And another. And another. At dawn he separated the young, the sickly, and women with young children and turned them back, because this army had much farther to go. He got the olz onto the highway and headed north, and he ranged widely both day and night, recruiting olz and searching out deserted durrl headquarters to plunder for food and grain bags. He exchanged his worn-out grilz for grilz the durrlz had abandoned in their sudden flight. He saw no durrlz, no rascz. Again the alarm had spread instantaneously on the first glimpse of the massed olz.
He began to experiment. He selected an ol of unusually large stature, positioned him at the head of the column each morning, and had him make the gesture of movement and call out, “Come!” By the third morning Farrari was no longer needed to get the march started.
At night Farrari scattered his olz among the local ol villages, marching a delegation to rob the local durrl of the necessary food. The crowds were so huge around the nightfires that sometimes the cooking pot was emptied and refilled all through the night.
And at dawn the chosen leader would take his place in the highway, gesture, mouth a word, and the march would recommence. On the seventh morning Farrari watched the olz out of sight, and then he led them. He traveled south until he reached an east-west highway, and then he raced west at top speed. Toward the river.
Again he traveled day and night, and this time he met no one, overtook no one. The highway ended in sight of the immensely broad, swift river. He could not coax the grilz into the water, so after securing a piece of quarm log from the nearest ol village he turned them loose, made a bundle of his clothing, and as soon as darkness fell he pushed the log into the water. Choosing a pattern of stars to steer by, he struck out for the opposite shore. Grueling hours later he landed far downstream. He rested the next day, stole a gril and a bundle of grain bags the following night, and after a day of reconnoitering he appeared at an ol nightfire. “Come!”
Now he singled out only the most able looking males. The next morning, when he reached a north-south highway, he had a mere hundred ol following him, but they were the best looking olz he had ever seen. He appointed a leader and got the column started.
Toward Scorv.
XVIII
Farrari watched his army’s progress with tortuous uncertainty. At some moment before it reached Scorv, this swelling crowd of passive, plodding slaves had to become one of two things: a genuine army with weapons, or an enraged mob that could carry all before it with the sheer weight of its fury and numbers. He would hide in the zrilm and watch the olz shuffle past, desperately searching each face. He needed a spark, or the magic word that would produce a spark. “How do you make a man hate?” he mused.
They slouched along the highway with the same awkward, shuffling walk they had used for more generations than any IPR historian had been able to count, and they could not be hurried. They held the long grain bags clumsily in front of them. Once Farrari halted the column and took the trouble to place each ol’s bag over his shoulder, and the following day the bags again were carried in front of them.
The march was taking them farther from home than they had ever been. If they thought of this, if they speculated at all as to why they were marching, their faces revealed none of it—nor anything else. They had been told to march; they marched.
Farrari needed a spark.
He began to collect all the weapons he could find, but he wrapped them in cloth, making untidy, unrecognizable bundles of them, before he gave them to the olz to carry. A rasc seeing a spear bearing of wouldn’t wait to find out whether or not the ol could throw it—and the olz could not or would not throw spears.
They did not need to become skilled. A thousand olz throwing blindly from behind a zrilm hedge could decimate a squadron of a hundred rascz trapped in a lane. But though the olz would hold a spear, carry a spear, or drop a spear on command, they would not throw it.
Even a distant rumor of marching olz continued to put the durrlz to flight, so they met no traffic and Farrari never saw a rasc. While his olz marched obediently behind their appointed leaders, he ranged far on either side of the highway, scouting out abandoned durrl headquarters to raid for supplies, and selecting recruits from olz at work in the fields they passed. His olz paid no attention to him at all, because none of them dared look at an assistant durrl, and so it was that when he found an ol not only looking at him, but even following him about, he was instantly aware of it. Amused, he circled behind the ol and asked, “Are you lost?”
“Yes,” Peter Jorrul muttered. “Completely lost. I can’t begin to figure out what’s going on.”
“You’re the most unlikely ol I’ve ever seen,” Farrari told him. “All your muscles are in the wrong places.”
“I had to see this for myself. Liano told us you were dead, and then—” “Liano? Where is she?”
“At base. She came to my headquarters and asked to be sent back.”
“You mean she said I was dead?” Jorrul nodded.
“How is she?”
“Well. Normal.”
“What do you mean by ‘normal’?”
“Normal means normal,” Jorrul said dryly. “She seems to have lost her clairvoyancy. Know anything about that?”
“I know she lost it just in time. Is she—happy?”
A smile touched Jorrul’s lips. “She may be when she hears that you’re alive.” He paused and then said sternly, “Just what are you trying to do?”
“Free the olz,” Farrari said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I told base that if you really were involved in this we’d find a new record for regulations broken in one operation, with maybe our mission completely ruined and the planet blown as a bonus. Thus far I haven’t seen a single false step. The olz seem to be doing this all by themselves. I haven’t heard you give a single order, and yet the olz are marching on Scorv. How did you manage it?”
“You heard what Liano said. I died.”
“Listen, Farrari. This is a serious matter. We have to know—” He broke off as Farrari opened his cloak, exposing the puncture scars.